BY WOSSEN MELAKU
Samantha Power, the USAID Administrator, is planning to come to Addis this weekend. In her own words, she is coming in order to “press the Government of Ethiopia to allow full and unhindered humanitarian access to prevent famine in Ethiopia’s Tigray region”.
This is a noble mission. Starvation must be averted by all means. Indeed, that is also what drives the Ethiopian Government today.
But, in trying to press the Government of Ethiopia to allow full and unhindered humanitarian access to Tigray, I urge Ms Power to understand the situation on the ground better. Critical as humanitarian access is, it is not necessarily in the gift of the Ethiopian Government alone. The senseless war imposed by the TPLF on all of us, Tigreans included, has made access to Tigray a dangerous adventure. Too many aid workers have given their lives trying to help us. That must stop.
So, if Ms Power comes to Addis with an agenda to press our Government, what agenda does the Government await her with? Here are a few thoughts.
I have never met Ms Power, but I feel like I have known her for a long time because I have read her books. She writes beautifully. She does everything in her life with passion. Almost everything she has wished and accomplished as a public servant seems to have been driven by one question: how to harness American power to protect the poor and the vulnerable.
But then, intentions are not everything; actions and their consequences are. Context and understanding matter.
In today’s Ethiopia, Ms Power’s insistence on unhindered humanitarian access to prevent famine in the Tigray region of Ethiopia is clearly noble-intentioned and must be supported by all means.
But, that exclusive focus on the Ethiopian Government also betrays her lack of understanding of TPLF’s role in all this – its use of starvation as a strategy to gain sympathy and support from the likes of Ms Power and her Government. I fear that Ms Power’s laudable commitment to the cause of human rights, first sparked 32 years ago by the image of the heroic struggle of Chinese students for democracy in Tiananmen Square, has been hijacked by TPLF’s murderous agenda. To take a current example, if TPLF were to cease hostilities in the Afar region, humanitarian aid could reach our citizens quickly.
TPLF’s baseless and self-serving narrative of genocide is likely to have found an easy convert in this passionate soul who cut her political teeth in the Balkans in the early 1990s, covering the Bosnia war as a freelance reporter on the ground, at times risking her own life. Need I add that she won the highly prestigious Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her appropriately titled book: A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide?
Ms Power has the passion as well as the expertise to understand humanitarian issues better than most. However, to succeed in her mission in Ethiopia, she needs to better understand our complex reality. Her visit to Addis can only help. That is why she must be welcomed and helped to get closer to the actors. She has a good track record of informing herself with personal observations on the ground. She remains a war reporter at heart. If she allows herself the opportunity to observe carefully, she will see through TPLF deception.
When this former war reporter was asked by the New Yorker back in 2014 what she had learned from working for the Obama Administration, her reply was a simple one: “Don’t trust the press”.
Yet, I fear that Ms Power might still be unduly influenced by the press rather than wait for clear evidence. At one point in her most beautiful book from 2019 – The Education of an Idealist – she talks about a series of articles by Nick Kristof on Darfur published in the New York Times (NYT). She then admits: “The more I read Kristof’s reporting, the more I suspected that the Sudanese military and affiliated militia were perpetrating genocide.”
Kristof is writing and tweeting on Ethiopia today, routinely and wrongly accusing the Ethiopian Government of deliberately starving its citizens in Tigray and praising the distorted, malicious and irresponsible reporting by his NYT colleague Declan Welsh. In one of her most insightful reflections about her work as a war reporter, Ms Power wrote: “With no end to the war in sight, I was starting to feel increasingly like a vulture, preying upon Bosnian misery to write my stories.” I hope Declan Walsh of the NYT and his peers at The Economist, Financial Times, CNN and Reuters – our modern-day vultures – have read her book.
Against this background, I am hopeful that Ms Power is coming to Ethiopia because she wants to learn the truth from direct observation on the ground. As she wrote in her book, “Ever since my time in Bosnia, I had believed that I could best learn about a situation where events were unfolding.
… I tried to bring this ‘get close’ spirit to diplomacy.” Nothing demonstrated that spirit better than her decision when she was US Ambassador to the UN, to travel to West Africa at the height of the Ebola outbreak in October 2014 at grave personal risk to herself and against the advice of her husband and even Susan Rice, the National Security Advisor at the time.
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD AUGUST 3/2021
